


Once Upon a Time in Polythreme

by kylee



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Animism, Erudition for the Sake of Erudition, Gen, Neathlore, Original Player Characters, Peaches in Chinese Folklore, Platonism, Slightly Slashy, The Stoic Conception of the Soul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-11
Updated: 2013-12-11
Packaged: 2018-01-04 07:50:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1078416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kylee/pseuds/kylee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two Fallen Londoners sojourn across the Zee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once Upon a Time in Polythreme

The pen was the first to speak. It said, "You're being erudite for the sake of erudition," and, "Must you say 'pneuma' when 'soul' will do?" Meanwhile the ink writhed and whispered  _I will outlast you_. "Ambitious," said the pen. "Impertinent," said the inkwell. When pen and inkwell set to arguing, the Bespectacled Folklorist was prepared to throw the whole draft over -- but he hesitated to crumple the page. The paper whimpered so.

"To say 'soul' creates a connotation," he later complained, "that I laboured to avoid. 'Pneuma' might translate to 'soul,' but conceptually, philosophically, it exceeds what we imagine when we speak of -- for instance -- the Christian soul. To the Stoics it was the  _causa continens_ of matter. It was fire and air and breath. It was the principle of cohesion at the heart of the universe: in the form of a stone, in the emergence of an acorn, in the will of a man. If I'm to explain  _how_ my pen can criticise my writing, I must be comprehensive, must I not? Instead of asking how the inanimate transforms to the animate, ask instead how one manner of pneuma transforms into another ..."

"Such pretty metaphysics," his companion cooed. The Bohemian Epicene leaned over the deck of the submersible, fair hair a halo against the black of the zee. "Don't you think so, Aaron? Aaron," he explained, "is my cravat. He claimed he'd clash with my waistcoat, but I'd say the two are getting on  _marvellously_ , now that they've been properly introduced."

The cravat huffed its grudging agreement, nestling closer to its wearer's throat. The Folkorist could only blink.

He hadn't thought to ask his possessions' names.

 

* * *

 

This was to be the Epicene's first sojourn in Polythreme, and like any place else, it was a place of undiscovered delight. As he sauntered unto the quayside, the ground laughed beneath his footsteps -- the copper railings cried their greetings and he cried his. He exclaimed over the pale beauty of the buildings and traded compliments with colonnades. He clapped his hands over a dancing clothes-colony, sleeves swirling as it passed. " _Bravi, bravi_!"

The Folklorist had been before, seeking out the ends of Neathlore and the origins of the Clay. His tread came quieter, his gaze selective but incisive. His was a a gaze honed for secrets, and for those that yielded them. Under the din, he heard the marble path murmuring of the King and his Hundred Hearts, and of of loss and a love four cities old, as vast as the Unterzee. Yet his eyes remained on the Epicene.

"Look, surface-silk, and blue as glim-fall! Aren't you a pretty thing? How are you to-day?"

The pen spoke up again, as the Folklorist composed his next letter to London. "You praise him overmuch. Are you enamoured with him?"

"I am not," said the Folklorist, "and I do not. It is not praise to say he stops and speaks to all he meets with an indiscriminate effervescence, so lifting the spirits of a city already inspirited ..."

"How do you define 'praise'? You should write a treatise on that, next."

Try though he might to blight the line out, the ink still spilled to speak the truth.

 

* * *

 

They supped at Arcimboldo's -- hearty food, opinionated, daring the Folklorist to finish it like a pugilist in the ring. The Epicene did not so much drink his wine as romance it, whirling it about its glass, whispering it a promise at the tip of his tongue. Peach-skins sighed in satisfaction on his plate.

"Polythreme exports its peaches from the East," the Folklorist explained. "The Widow's land, that the Fourth City called its last bastion of salvation."

"Are these the fruits of heaven, then? Persian apples from Eve's garden?"

"Hsi Wang Mu's garden, perhaps. They say when the King dreams, he dreams of a journey westward ..."

"Your mind's off like an excitable hound again," the Epicene teased. "Don't leave me behind. Hsi Wang Mu?"

The Folklorist might have protested the analogy. Instead he said, with the air of a tutor: "The Queen Mother of the West who lived between Heaven and Earth, mountain and cloud, and kept the orchard in which grew the peaches of immortality."

"I see, I see. And the King?"

"He of the Hundred Hearts, who dreams the Clay Men into being. The genius loci of Polythreme."

"What a man he must be," the Epicene said, "if he can be called a man. I've always said if you want to know a person, take him to a honey-dream. Look beyond all he  _is_ to all he would imagine himself to be. Here's someone who's imagined himself into a multitude, into a city's worth of personalities -- and all so lively and charming! I can't wait to meet the next part of him."

"They yearn for unity." The words stumbled out so quickly they felt like confession, rather than observation. "If you listen. They say  _make me one again with the Hundreds._ "

"Oh, but what man's ever at one with himself?"

"I should think that a tautology."

Laughing loud and bright, the Epicene said, "I never think what I should."

 

* * *

 

Objects shared uncanny kinships in Polythreme. Within a little time, the Epicene knew them all. He knew _just_ what their table at the cafe thought of the copper tea-kettle in the kitchen, and which cups it most looked forward to passing an afternoon with. In the Clay Markets, a chest of surface-silks shared the names of its children long since left, bargained to zailors from over the zee. And the courtship of Aaron and the waistcoat continued, as they hung together in the closet.

At first, the Folklorist could only watch and wonder.

"Come, now -- you needn't be so shy --"

"I am not  _shy_. I am merely ... deferring to your experience." He readjusted his spectacles, and his spectacles muttered about  _people_  and their  _pretenses_. Masks never had names and neither did spectacles. "Plato wrote, once, on the superiority of dialogue to written discourse. When you inquire into written discourse, you receive no answer but what has been given -- like the majestic silence of a portrait before a living being. I am, I confess, more accustomed to such silences, for I was raised on books ..."

"And books make marvellous practice! They open into worlds untouched, so we'll learn the wonder of touching them. Aren't you a folklorist? Isn't what you  _do_ get involved with people and ravel out their stories?"

"Even so, I ..."

"Come along." The Epicene reached out a hand. "We've a world to meet."

That much was true.

_But you_ , thought the Folkorist,  _have a world to give._

 

* * *

 

The Folklorist had the hushed places in a city never-silent -- the waiting scrutiny of the eye temple, where the priest preached the future of the mountain and the garden; the villa on the hill where the Neath held its breath; the Voice in the Fog.

"The Voice in the Fog?"

Song emanated out the doors. The Folklorist led the way, finger to his lips. Mischief might have sparked behind his spectacles.

_Oh._ As the music flowed through him, the Epicene's eyes grew wide and his smile grew wider. The tavern kept its quiet as each person sang their piece: zailors sang of danger on the zee, Clay Men of cedars and a festival for the Hundreds, women in white dresses of the price of surface-silk, and a devil of the Western Wall and the Iron Republic. The furniture clattered and clapped.

The Epicene hugged the Folklorist like a jacket, and was as loath to let go.

But objects shared uncanny kinships in Polythreme.


End file.
